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Raptors melt away in Game 4 blowout loss to Cavs

CLEVELAND—By the end the Toronto Raptors had become a punchline. On the flagship ESPN show Pardon The Interruption, Tony Kornheiser called them the Washington Generals. On ESPN’s nationally broadcast Dan Le Batard radio show, as the Raptors faced elimination at the hands of the Cleveland Cavaliers and LeBron James in Game 4 Monday night, Le Batard and his crew were having a ball.

“How embarrassing is it, though? You change everything about yourselves to beat this one person, and he’s howling with laughter at you, shooting basketballs out his butt into the basket?” said Le Batard. They cackled at Drake being chirped by LeBron’s eldest son on Instagram. They giggled at DeMar DeRozan talking about thriving in adversity.

Cleveland Cavaliers star LeBron James praised Toronto after defeating the Raptors 128-93 Monday night. Cleveland ousted Toronto in a four-game sweep in the NBA Eastern Conference semifinal. (The Canadian Press)

“(LeBron’s) laughing at them,” said Le Batard. “It looks like so much fun for everybody involved except the Raptors.”

And at ground level, the Raptors were unable to prove anyone wrong. It was 51-47 with three minutes left in the first half of Game 4; coach Dwane Casey inserted Bebe into the game, even after Jonas Valanciunas had a dominant little run earlier in the game. Casey wanted their best big man passer in there, despite the fact he had barely played since early April. Bebe doesn’t try to score, and can’t guard Kevin Love. At halftime Cleveland was up 16.

They melted away. The top-seeded, 59-win Raptors lost 128-93, and the season ends the same way last season did, swept and humiliated. Last year, team president Masai Ujiri declared a culture reset and the team reinvented itself. And at the end it blew a series that should have been much less punchline-friendly than this.

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“Probably it was the mental stuff, not the basketball stuff,” said Raptors centre Jonas Valanciunas, asked the difference between Toronto’s regular season and playoffs. “Probably that was the mental stuff.” Asked what that meant, he said, “We’ve got to be ready to win. We’ve got to be ready to do big things. Maybe we were not ready ... They wanted it more than us. That’s why.”

Valanciunas had 18 points, five rebounds and three blocks in 16 minutes; the Raptors were outscored by just one in his 10 first-half minutes, which compared to everybody else wasn’t bad at all. His comments were faintly damning. Others were, too.

“We played hard enough. Some of the games we played well enough,” said guard Fred VanVleet. “I’m not sure we played smart enough all the time. We just didn’t play well enough to win. We didn’t play well enough to win the series. We didn’t play championship basketball. We fought. And unfortunately, this time of year that’s not enough. You have to do all the extra things. And give those guys credit, they outplayed us.”

“I mean, definitely some heavy blows,” said Raptors forward C.J. Miles before the game. “But ... I think it’s just about getting tired of getting into situations where you feel like you’re right where you’re supposed to be, giving yourself multiple chances to win games, in certain situations, and not to be able to figure out how to do it.”

Kyle Lowry and the Raptors absorbed their 10th straight playoff defeat at the hands of the Cavaliers in Monday night’s Game 4 in Cleveland. (Tony Dejak / AP)

Tired. That was it. Tired of being LeBron’s punching bag, tired of things going just wrong enough. Miles said he could see the breakdowns, they all could. It was simple stuff, a lot of it. In this one, the physical play from Game 3, the hard stuff, was mostly gone. LeBron punctuated a 46-23 run with a falling-out-of-bounds rainbow from behind the backboard toward the end of the third quarter, just to remember him by. He had an easy 29 points, 11 assists and eight rebounds, but the rest of the starting five was in double figures, too.

The Raptors have never been taken seriously around the league, not enough, and this was the year they could have changed that. And again, everything could have been different. LeBron is the greatest force in basketball. But he can be beaten.

But the Raptors blew Game 1 with defensive miscues so basic you would have thought they had never seen Cleveland play before, followed by extraordinary crunch-time failure. That was the unforgivable sin. Cleveland had one day to prepare; the Raptors had three. Everything cascaded from that.

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“We winged it in Game 1,” said LeBron. Think about that. They winged it, and the Raptors were still the ones making mistakes.

Someone will probably get blamed. You can point to their lack of true star power. When Cleveland extended that lead from four to 16, DeRozan and Kyle Lowry combined for two points and three assists in 21 combined second-quarter minutes. Lowry was steadily good in the entire post-season until Game 2, excellent in Game 3, and vanished in Game 4; DeRozan had a truly empty series at both ends of the floor, with 67 points on 66 shots, no threes, an ejection at the end, and his defence was a black hole.

And it showed. Cleveland outscored the Raptors by 74 with DeRozan on the floor, versus by 56 for the series. Lowry was a minus-47, which is comparatively good. As a wise NBA mind said the other day, no star in this league fears DeRozan and Lowry, and that creates a ceiling that’s hard to crack.

“I always take accountability for how I play, as a leader,” said DeRozan. “Just trying to make the right plays to get a rhythm going, not just for myself but for my teammates as well. And for myself, couldn’t find a rhythm. And we couldn’t get it clicking like we did in the regular season.”

But the Raptors still could have won this series, or at least made it hard. You can point at Serge Ibaka’s calcification. You can find limitations the Raptors hid all season.

And if you wanted you could blame the coach, and that’s the most likely place for blame to land. Casey had a great year, and a lousy second round. Too often his adjustments were a step slow, his matchups weren’t right. How could Toronto leave Cleveland’s shooters open in Game 1, and let them kill them all series long? How could little things like out-of-bounds plays, on offence or defence, get lost? The Cavs are hard to guard with LeBron and shooters, but one Toronto constant in these games was a lack of execution on details that at this level can tip a series, and end a season.

“I just think the room for error and the margin for error is so much smaller in the post-season,” said VanVleet. “One mistake can cost you, one bad minute. I think at the end of the second they went up 10, 12, 15 in a minute and 30 seconds. So those lapses, you can’t have breakdowns in any stretch. You’ve got to play a complete game. And in this series at least, I don’t think we put together a full 48.”

“If one of those tip-ins goes in at home in the first game, it’s a different story,” said Casey. “But like I said, close doesn’t count. It just tells us how small a margin we have as a team to go against a team like this.” He said he thought his team was “emotionally drunk” after the Game 1 and 3 losses; maybe they were.

He also said “we can’t let this series define us.” It’s not their whole story, but the post-season is the biggest point, and there were real expectations on this team. As Casey said, “10 days ago we had all the confidence in the world.”

So maybe Casey, a great man, gets the blame. It’s too neat a solution for a team with other fundamental issues between them and true contention. But Casey has come close to being fired before, and even after his finest season he is the easiest card to play. The Raptors truly believed they were the better team, and if they had only played up to their capabilities they could have been proven right.

“We had a successful regular season, and we failed in the post-season,” said VanVleet. “It’s that simple. It’s not really that complicated. You don’t have to mix the two together. Because we got swept or lost in the second round doesn’t take away from our regular season. But in the grand scheme of things we came up short, and we understand that. ”

The Raptors can bring back the same personnel, more or less, and hope the improvements of their young players offset decline among their older ones. They can roll out another 50-win season. They can look back at this series and believe they were good enough.

But they weren’t. If you are a Raptors fan, this is the year this team lifted you higher and let you down harder than any other year in franchise history. It was the most successful Raptors season ever, until it was the most disappointing Raptors season ever. More than anything, this organization has fought to be taken seriously. And after everything — after a great season, full of fight — they wound up a punchline, and vanished without a trace.

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